It’s a Trap? Lucasarts Tease X-Wing Special Edition.

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Yeah, this is the sort of semi-rumour which we don’t usually touch. But because it’s for one of Those Iconic PC Games and It’s Kinda Obvious They May Do This One, The Feed at G4 are reporting Lucasart’s Darrell Rodriguez’s response to being quizzed on whether they’ll be doing X-Wing or Tie-Fighter in the wake of the success of the Monkey Island Special Edition…

“We don’t have any announcements now, but stay tuned,” said Rodriguez. “We will soon…..”

Which could, of course, mean anything, but sounds like as good excuse as any for another orgy of what-Lucasarts-classics-we’d-like-to-see. Me? Rescue on Fractalus! The Eidolon! Ballblazer!

It would be great if it is true, they were great games. I have great memories of spending hours (and lots of reloads) trying to take down a rebellious Star Destroyer by myself with a lone tie fighter. One of my proudest gaming achievements.

Seriously? The killing they could make? Holy crap. TIE Fighter is one of the few games I finished multiple times during my adolescence. The adventure games are all well and good (bring on their SEs, certainly) but LucasArts could probably bring in a hefty (from a B. Gates-ian perspective, even) sum by releasing special editions of the flight sims.

I have to be honest, I preffered X-Wing vs Tie Fighter for multiplayer and the engine for X-Wing alliance was vastly superior.

If they could bring back the fully 3d cockpits of XWA, the great storylines of TIE and X-Wing and stay true to the fantastic mechanics of star wars space pew pew, I and I imagine many, many others will be Happy Bunnies.

X-Wing vs Tie Fighter didn’t define gaming for me but I did have good memories playing it with my sister back in the days. I specifically remember loading the CDs into one of those CD-ROM drives with a cassette kind of case.

One of us would focus on flying the mission while someone roleplayed as an R2 unit with the keymap open in front of them and doing the maintenance functions the pilot requested. It was mainly just managing the shield/laser power and locking the S-foils but it was a fun way to make X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter a co-op game when you’re 8-9 or somesuch age.

This would be really cool since I now have another younger sister (15 year age gap!) who is getting into gaming. She really loves the old Lucasarts adventures and Star Wars games in general so.. yeah this would be a fine way to spend a weekend with her blasting imperial scum out of the skies! And maybe also getting my other sister back into the gaming fold, the two sisters loved playing the Lego Indiana Jones game together.

So yeah, family gaming ❤ story and such. Bring us back our X-Wings Lucasarts, damn you!

I want desperately for a good traditional space flight simulator. A rebirth of the X-Wing series might just do it. The only game in recent years that has satiated my demands has been Freespace, but even then it lacked decent wingman management and the fleet battles that the X-wing series has.

My only fear is that they will approach this to cater to a casual market. Look at the Battlefield series, BF:Heroes is a joke, and BF:1943 is a tremendously stripped down version of the original. If they don’t maintain the complexities of the original, they end up insulting their target audience in order to make quick sales.

I’m hopeful, but pessimistic at the same time regarding this announcement.

I never played X-Wing or TIE Fighter (I was all of four months old when the first X-Wing game was released), but it sounds like a laugh.
I assume I should be excited, so:
Woo!
If they do make a new X-Wing/TIE Fighter game, I’ll buy it for sure. Space is fun times!

Wow, that might actually be enough to bring me back to space sims. I don’t know WHY I’ve so completely lost interest in the genre, but whether it’s Freelancer or X3 I just can’t seem to get back into the genre. This upsets me.

Man, I had an insanely expensive sound setup which was great for X-Wing – a Roland CM32L module for the music plus a Soundblaster card for the FX.

Probably completely pathetic by modern audio standards (it was MIDI music, f’rheavensakes), but back then it was the cat’s whiskers. Would have been the dog’s bollocks, but that term hadn’t been coined, yet.

@ Fumarole – I don’t (Well, actually I own four but none of them work with my current build) but by god the day they confirm a TIE Fighter: Special Edition I’ll buy the best damn joystick I can find. Whether they do remakes or a new game or both I think they’ll probably will need to make them joypad compatible and do a 360 release but that’s possible. Some guy over at Kotaku wrote out one potential way it could be done without removing any of the controls by using the R1 and L1 as modifiers like shift and ctrl, it wasn’t pretty but it would work.

I liked the Freelancer control system (mouse + keyboard)–it worked suprisingly well.

I loved X-Wing and TIE Fighter (and Freelancer, fwiw), and played them heaps, but as enjoyable as they were, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the dogfighting was just a little too artificial and routine: Start with a game of chicken, then chase a weaving target all over the place until they asplode. (It was state-of-the-art AI for the X-Wing games, but pretty tired by the time Freelancer came along.)

I’m not sure I’d like a full space-physics simulation, but something with a little more combat variety, perhaps incorporating stealth and a variety of approaches to mission goals.

Oh, realistic space explosions and an adherence to Newton’s First Law would be nice, too.

how odd, just his weekend I was trying to get TIE fighter collectors edition working in some fashion on XP (TIE>Xwing) and its a nightmare.
As much as i’d love a remake, im sure they’d botch it. Or it’d be toomuch ‘console-ified’. (ive just played Red Baron arcade on PSN and was a little bit sick in my mouth)
I want my proper joystick controls!!

The original sequences in the movies were based off of WWII dogfights, which of course were very unrealistic for something taking place in space. But it’s fun. Remove that, it’s not StarWars – you might as well add a goofy sidekick for the kids or make Han only shoot Greedo as a defensive reaction. Oh, wait…

I was playing Grim Fandango again yesterday and this brilliant game desperately needs a special edition. Nothing that would take that much work, but there’s some stuff that needs updating here:
– higher resolution graphics
– better textures and more polygons for the characters
– a key that when pressed shows all interactive objects on the screen
– please, the horrible control method! Make the inventory something like Monkey Island and not that stupid close up selecting all objects. At least make it like EFMI!
– add mouse support and point and click gameplay as an alternative

That way new generations may enjoy the excellent game and we can enjoy the game again because it is starting to date really badly.

I will throw buckets of money at Lucasarts if they somehow remake/re-release Tie Fighter, X-Wing, or X-Wing Alliance. I grew up playing those on the PC and I can remember getting the expansion card just to use the joystick that the older games required. And then there was the time that I went over to my cousin’s and heard it with a sound card for the first time.

Lucasarts has a lot of classics that they could bring back, hopefully they’re starting to wake up and tap their catalogue from “the good old days”.